Benghazi Wednesday, Part Two

Evidently, the Secretary Of State's appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee went about the way you'd expect it to go before a House majority that thinks Steve (Impeach The President For Being President) Stockman, Joe (You Lie!) Wilson, and Dana (Dinosaur Flatulence) Rohrabacher should have an important say in how the country conducts its foreign policy. Apparently, the highlight was Rep. Jeff Duncan, from where-the-fck-else South Carolina, who decided to shine up his image for the bookers on Fox.

Responding to Clinton's assertion that it doesn't make a difference, at this point, whether the attack was spawned from a spontaneous protest or was coordinated, Duncan said "it makes a difference when Americans think they were misled about something for political reasons."

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(Apparently, the Secretary's "What difference does it make?" from Wednesday morning is going to be the wingnut chew-toy of the week inside the bubble. This, I predict, will work as well as "We Did Build It!" worked during the presidential campaign.)

OK, empiricism first. "Americans" do " think they were misled about something for political reasons." These would be all those Americans who get their news from Fox, and off the AM radio dial, through their bridgework, and all the other places in which the Jeff Duncans of the world get some run in the media. Unfortunately for Duncan, and fortunately for the rest of us, these Americans have never been anywhere close to a majority.

On Libya, 54% of the country is dissatisfied with the administration's response to the Benghazi attack, with only four in ten saying they're satisfied with the way the White House handled the matter. "But that dissatisfaction is not because Americans see a cover-up," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Only 40% believe that the inaccurate statements that administration officials initially made about the Benghazi attack were an attempt to deliberately mislead the public. Fifty-four percent think those inaccurate statements reflected what the White House believed to be true at the time."

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(For what it's worth, this is also what 100 percent of me believes.)

(Also, too — the idea that the Secretary Of State feels obligated to say, "I have to confess, here in public, going on the Sunday shows is not my favorite thing to do...There are other things I'd prefer to do on Sunday mornings," in reply to an omadhaun like Joe Wilson, and that this admission is considered in anyway newsworthy, is evidence enough that our politics are pretty well fked.)

It only came to me late in the afternoon, and with some prompting by a commenter, why the Secretary was able to handle so easily the feral children of the House, and the feral pre-adolescents like Ron Johnson in the Senate. It's not because she was a senator, although that probably helped. And it's not because she spent four years eating canapes with various dictators and democrats around the world. It's because she was First Lady — and therefore, Target 1A — during the craziest four years anyone ever saw. The whole Republican Benghazi legend is spun from the same ball of fantasy whence came Vince Foster's death, and the billing records, and the cattle futures, and her lesbianism, and the crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree. And, of course, the original Whitewater scandal, a nothingburger that was peddled by every poolroom liar in Arkansas to many of our oh-so-civil members of the elite political press, until it came somehow to include bill-padding (Webster Hubbell), local influence-peddling (the very dubious conviction of Jim Guy Tucker), the conviction of people who swindled the Clintons themselves, which was somehow proof that the Clintons were swindling people, and, remarkably, at the end of the day, the wandering penis of the president of the United States.

That was what Benghazi was going to be. You could see them working it. "Benghazi" was going to be the secret conjuring mist within which this president's assumed anti-Americanism, and his essential Otherness, would swirl around what actually happened in Libya until it became an all-encompassing cloud in which nothing had to be proven because everything was "out there." Benghazi was going to be the Arkansas Project with an actual body count.

Well, for whatever her faults in this episode, Mrs. Clinton had eight years practice batting away this kind of innuendo-laden crapola. Small wonder she was able to do it so ably today. The feral children in the Congress are the feral children of the conservative politics that pursued Mrs. Clinton and her husband. Jeff Duncan is what Joe Scarborough once was, before liberal MSNBC made him the idol of a sliver of a portion of the audience on cable teevee. They are the progeny of all the elves. Oh, she has seen this movie before. Surely, she has done that.